Debian Live scripts help us create 100% “official” Debian systems as “Live CD’s” . This is the procedure involved if you want to create one yourself:
First, you need to have a working Debian system.
Follow the instructions given here and install cdebootstrap and the live helper (lh) scripts.
Create a new folder, say, debian-live; change into that folder and type:
lh_config
This command will complete in a moment; you have to then execute:
lh_build
This is the script which pulls down the base Debian system (just the bare essentials - no stuff like X) from the net and creates the Live CD; once the script ends, you will see a file `binary.iso’ which you can burn to a CD/DVD.
Some statistics:
On my AMD sempron system, the lh_build script took 134 minutes to complete (256Kbps DataOne connection). The resulting `binary.iso’ is 87Mb in size. It booted in just 30 seconds (had to do a Ctrl-C when DHCP requests started) and consumed 60Mb of memory. Not bad!
The scripts are flexible - you can do a lot of customization - check this out
Problems:
I tried to `cache’ the .deb files as per the instructions given here. It
didn’t work as expected …. have to try again!
3 responses so far ↓
1 Mikael P // Jan 31, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Interresting article, although I have figured most out earlier. I will try cdebootstrap instead of debootstrap though.
I am trying to make a 486 USB image based on Sid, but it fails, probably due to linux-image-2.6-486 depending on a 2.6.22 package that no longer exists in the archive. Does anyone know how I can tell the live scripts to use the current 2.6 package, I think it’s 2.6.23-1-486?
Thanks!
2 Beren // Mar 5, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Give apt-cacher a try.
It’s saved me a lot of bandwidth.
3 Beren // Mar 5, 2008 at 1:31 pm
and Mikael, do you just need an “aptitude update” ?
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